I purchased the game at 1.0 release. SO far can't complain at all. The gameplay is straight. The tutorial guides you very well. The devs are very friendly and helpful and listen to the community, which I do respect very much! The gameplay itself is easy explained. You select a site and size for restaurant and than you do fill your menu. You can use pre-made recipes or use your custom recipes, whichI strongly suggest. Before you start makeing yur own dishes think about who you want serve. You have no pedigree and your first customers are Cheapskates, which just want NOM for a cheap price. You can't make an expensive beef stew or steak. You need to be costeffective-stuffing. So target groups are a thing. You start off with cheapskate customers. They like yummy cheap food like Pasta. After some time you are popular (by customers reviews) and attract more interesting customers, like vegetarians or families. Even later Gourmets and Food Enthusiasts. They all pay more cash for good food (high quality stuff!). So upgrade your ingredients quality and expand your influence into other districts of the region (city map with districts which can attract more customers from outside). The ingredients are in a seperate window and you add them easily to recipe editor. The recipe editor has a guidance feat to help you make the dish you want and is fairly easy to use. You also want to upgrade your skills and that your employees do not overwork themselves. Have enough waiters/chefs, 4 tables for a waiter works for me. You can specialize employees to certain tasks too. The interior of the Restaurant can be decorated in many ways and you have no restrictions. Customer groups want different interior ratings (modern, elegant or rustic) so add a good mix of different items. There is also policies you can apply and also ads to attract certain customer types. In a whole a solid game for me and starts where Restaurant Tycoon left off. Thanks, keep it up and great Job so far!
The game has a good humor, no doubt. Though also appreciated the tutorial. It's really helpful. Will not engage into stuff about the story etc. it's written all up already. I will not spoil too. The game currently suffers (on my end) from save file corruption. I would be forced to play this game again to the point where I am right now (~2/3 done). Problem is 1. it has a continuous one-save system and 2. you can not save via a menu, but you need to "sleep" (find a bed). The game is very grindy and you have to get a lot of resources for different applications. The NPCs bug, means some NPCs are not spawning on their respective ingame day. So you are not able to progress the story or gain access to a closed areas. For me very frustrating. The price is OK, but the bugs make it a hard pill to swallow.
Sorry to bring this up, but I think when Tropico 5 has a Complete Edition available with all DLC, than Tropico 4 should do too. It's a rip-off feeling, having to purchase the basegame and the DLCs separately. Cheers.
This was a truly glorious time for me, starting off with my first PC. I had an IBM with DX2-50, 4MB RAM, 1MB Cirrus Logic videocard and 250MB HDD! I upgraded the hardware to 8MB (+4MB, which cost around 100 EUR!) and added a Soundblaster 16 soundcard for really awesome sound immersion. Finally I purchased a joystick (Logitech WingmanExtreme) and enjoyed countless hours of chasing Z-95, X-Wing and all the other crafts around the galaxy. I can not count how many hours I spent in the cockpits of TIE-Interceptors, TIE-Advanced and TIE-Defenders. But I will tell this, there was no outlaw or rebel escaping my dutiful patrol! Maybe you guys should watch a good Youtube-LetsPlay first before you buy this game. Dunno if it is worth 10 USD, but I guess I will buy it on a sale. ;-)
